COINTELPRO

COINTELPRO, derived from Counter Intelligence Program, was a series of cover projects carried out by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations deemed "subversive". These ranged from anti-Vietnam War organizers, Civil Rights movement activists, feminist groups, anti-colonial organizations such as the Puerto Rican nationalist movement, leftist groups, and white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. J. Edgar Hoover began the COINTELPRO program in August 1956 with the goal of increasing factionalism, disruption, and defections within Communist Party USA, which had allegedly infiltrated the US government. Martin Luther King Jr. was a major target for COINTELPRO due to his socialist views, his leadership of the African-American civil rights movement, and his support for organized labor, and the FBI also widened the gap between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad and sabotaged movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islam, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, and rising leftist organizations. In 1971, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI uncovered the COINTELPRO program, and Hoover announced that centralized surveillance was at an end, with the illegal program coming to an abrupt end.